Slow USB thumb drives after formatting on a PC.
<p>Thumb drives are usually relatively fast when connected to a your Mac, and will mount in a few seconds and be accessible from the Desktop or Finder side-bar. This should happen as long as the format is one that's supported by OS X; however, sometimes a
Thumb drives are usually relatively fast when connected to a your Mac, and will mount in a few seconds and be accessible from the Desktop or Finder side-bar. This should happen as long as the format is one that's supported by OS X; however, sometimes after formatting a drive using Windows or another OS, they can start running slowly.
In some cases after formatting a thumb drive on Windows machines, people will end up using the older FAT16 format, which can cause some drives to take more time when mounting and copying files in OS X. This may not be the case with every thumb drive out there, but we have seen this cause slowdowns. Therefore, if your drive is taking time to mount and transfer data, first back up all the files on it and format the drive again.
With the drive conneted, open Disk Utility, select the drive device (not the volume) and click the "Partition" tab. Be sure when reformatting a problematic drive that you repartition the drive to clear and rebuild the partition tables, since corruption in these tables can cause slowdowns that can survive a simple reformat.
Select the desired format and name the partition accordingly, and then click "Apply". If you are only using the drive for Macintosh use, formatting it as HFS (Mac OS Extended) will give the best performance, but FAT32 is the only option that's the most compatible between Windows and Mac computers.
Other options for troubleshooting slow thumb drive performance are to use a differen USB slot. If you are using a relatively old computer, you may be using a USB 1.1 slot which can hinder performance. Use "System Profiler" with the drive connected and mounted to see what USB controller the drive is connected to, and check for the speed of the respective USB bus. USB 1.0 will show a 1.5Mb/sec speed, version 1.1 will go up to 12Mb/sec, and USB2 will show a 480Mb/sec transfer rate.
Be sure to unplug all other peripheral devices when troubleshooting your USB drive, and also try a PRAM reset if nothing else seems to work. Lastly, if your drive is not working, they are relatively cheap so getting a new one may be the simplest solution.
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